The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is a fully funded summer overseas language and cultural immersion program for American undergraduate and graduate students. With the goal of broadening the base of Americans studying and mastering critical languages and building relationships between the people of the United States and other countries, CLS provides opportunities to a diverse range of students from across the United States at every level of language learning. Students of diverse disciplines and majors are encouraged to apply. Participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period, and later apply their critical language skills in their future professional careers.

The CLS Program provides instruction in fourteen critical languages: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu. Participants in the CLS Program are not required to have completed any previous study for most of the fourteen languages. However, Chinese, Japanese and Russian require a minimum of two years of college-level study or the equivalent; Arabic and Persian require a minimum of one year of college-level study or the equivalent.

Applicants must:

Be a U.S. citizen. Non-citizens including Permanent Residents are not eligible, even if they anticipate naturalization by the beginning of the program.

Be enrolled in an accredited U.S. degree-granting program at the undergraduate (associate’s, bachelor’s) or graduate (master’s, doctoral, professional degree) level.

For complete information about this opportunity, including how to apply, click here.